Advice for incoming freshers can often be a little banal. From ‘do your assignments in good time’ to ‘use fairy lights to add a cosy vibe to your room’ to ‘make sure you sign up to UNiDAYS for awesome discounts at Pizza Express’, chances are you’ve heard it all before. But some valuable, niche nuggets of wisdom often go unshared, which is why we’ve pooled our knowledge to create this list of lesser-known uni hacks. If you’re gearing up to begin university this week, read on for our best – if slighty unhinged – tips on how navigate the ups and downs of student life.

HOOK UP WITH YOUR FRIENDS

‘Don’t sleep with your friends’, ‘don’t hook up with your flatmates’, ‘don’t shit where you eat’, blah blah blah. Why not? Who cares? Everyone knows online dating is terrible and, newsflash, meeting people in real life is the only alternative. Sometimes it can go wrong, yes, and you might have to see your ex snogging someone else when your friendship group goes on a big night out. That will be difficult and painful. But – it may shock you to learn this – that’s life! That’s what people had to do before dating apps! Plus, the thing that irks me so much about this preventative approach to dating is that it’s inherently pessimistic – the assumption is that if you try and enter into a relationship with someone in your social orbit, it will inevitably end and you will have to deal with awkwardly running into each other. It’s a risk, sure. But what if it doesn’t end? (SS)

IF YOU HAVE SOCIAL ANXIETY, PRETEND YOU ARE A DIFFERENT PERSON

This was my slightly unhinged strategy. When I got to university, I knew that I needed to push myself – to talk to people, to show up to things alone – in order to make friends, even though ordinarily doing these things made me feel like I was simultaneously a) on fire and b) being held at gunpoint. I figured that going to uni was a chance to start afresh: no one would know I was deathly afraid of talking to strangers and so I could pretend to be the kind of confident, self-assured social butterfly who has no problem with saying something like “hello, do you mind if I sit here? I love your bag by the way!” to random people in lecture halls. Being delulu really is the solulu sometimes: somehow, it worked, and I left uni with a coterie of close-knit friends who I still love to this day. (SS)

BE OK WITH PEOPLE HATING YOU

I want to be careful not to phrase this like “if you suffer from social anxiety, just get over it!!!” but most people, even the most painfully insecure, do tend to get more confident as they get older, so why not try to hurry the process along? I was deeply self-conscious when I arrived at university: I wanted people to think I was cool – sue me! But at some point – around second year – I basically just stopped being like this (which isn’t to say I no longer care what other people think, as just about everyone does). I realised that it’s very boring to spend all your time thinking about yourself, that there are more interesting things to occupy your inner monologue, and that it’s far better to go through the world assuming that everyone you meet is going to like you – this is not arrogant or vain, but an expression of goodwill. (JG)

DON’T FEEL BAD IF YOU DON’T VIBE WITH SOCIETIES

Many of my friends and colleagues at Dazed were members of uni societies and had a great time, so I’m not going to tell you not to bother with them. It’s definitely worth following your interests and giving them a try. But I also don’t think anyone should feel guilty for missing out on the “traditional university experience”. I tried attending a couple of societies at the beginning of first year, and they just weren’t for me. Later on I ended up getting a job in a pub and, through a mixture of choice and necessity, spent a lot of time working. I don’t regret this. To be clear, it’s a serious political problem that so many students have to work long hours just to make ends meet, and I don’t want to romanticise that. But some of the closest friendships and best memories I made at uni came through having a bar job. Even in terms of personal development or learning skills or whatever, I think it was really valuable. So by all means, check out a few societies – they could be great – but your future career and happiness will survive not rising to the rank of President of the QuidditchSoc. (JG)

ALLOW ROBOTS TO AID YOU

Use the ‘text to speech’ function on your laptop to proof your essays. It’s a gamechanger for spotting typos and grammatical mistakes when your eyes have glazed over after reading your essay five times in a row. (SS)

BRING EXTRA UNDERWEAR WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO OUT

Picture the scene: you’re at a club with your coursemates on the outskirts of the city you now call home. The lights come on; it’s time to go home. But oh no! The buses aren’t running and an Uber back to your halls is £20. A kind coursemate graciously offers to let you crash at theirs – their halls are a five-minute walk away. It’s an offer too good to refuse; if only you had some overnight bits with you! This may sound like quite a niche situation, but it’s something which can happen more often than you’d think, so it’s best to be a bit prepared by stuffing some clean pants and a trusty toothbrush into your bag when you head out at night.

(And, obviously, yes, sometimes you will end up going home with a man called something like Josh. You will wake up the next day tangled in navy bedsheets, naked, sweating, and parched. In this situation you will kill for anything – anything – to alleviate your discomfort. Clean underwear and the ability to brush your teeth – provided you can successfully extract a molecule of toothpaste from the inevitably 2D tube of Colgate in this man’s bathroom – will make the trudge home slightly more bearable.) (SS)

DON’T BOTHER WITH WEED

When I started uni, I thought I had it all figured out. A dedicated stoner, I would lecture my happily drunk friends about the evils of alcohol while chainsmoking myself into oblivion. Guess who probably had more fun at those parties? Not me. Now I’m not saying alcohol and cocaine are great for you, but I am saying that it took me until third year to realise that those drugs are much more of a social lubricant than weed is, and I definitely started to make more friends once I started drinking. Everyone has their own drug – I’ve met paranoid weed heads and drinkers with the dreaded blackout gene – and uni is the perfect time to find out what works for you (when else can you accidentally K-hole on a weekday and chalk it up to research?). Plus, if we’re talking cost-effectiveness, a gram of ketamine or a pill will go a lot further than sinking £9 pints in a London nightclub… you didn’t hear it from me! (SPM)

BUT DON’T GO OVERBOARD

Quite a lot of freshers will spend the year ahead doing large amounts of drugs. This can be a lot of fun – you might even have so much fun that you spend the rest of your life trying to recapture it with ever diminishing returns! – but it can also take a sledgehammer to your wellbeing. As someone with a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Life, I can tell you that the brain only has the capacity to experience so much pleasure within a given timeframe and that, without letting it rest, the feel-good chemicals run dry. This can be especially brutal when it’s winter and you’re living in an ugly block of flats in a new city, far from your family and friends. If you spend your first year of higher education railing lines, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favour by practicing moderation and allowing yourself some wholesome weekends too. You will almost certainly look back fondly on the nights you went out; but equally, you’re not going to regret staying in from time to time and getting a good night’s sleep. Also, everyone eventually realises that talking about drugs all the time and making them a cornerstone of your personality is really boring. Read a book! (JG)

AVOID GETTING SUCKED INTO THE SEEDY WORLD OF DIGITAL PIRACY

The cost of going to uni is increasing year on year, and research shows that students are more broke  than ever. In light of this, some desperate souls may try to save money by committing one of the most depraved and wicked criminal acts imaginable: downloading PDF and ebook versions of the texts they need for their courses. This may be understandable, but it is utterly unacceptable. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in his haunting 1866 masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, “Crime is never ok. Perioddd.” We all breathed a sigh of relief when Z Library (basically The Pirate Bay for books) was taken down in the UK a couple of years ago but the scourge of digital piracy lingered on: unfortunately, the site remains accessible if you download a Tor browser, and the sick individuals over at r/ZLibrary are still posting up-to-date links, laughing in the face of copyright law as they go. Don’t give into temptation. If a dodgy geezer comes up to you in the club and offers to sell you a PDF of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production, just say no. (JG)

DO NOT STEAL FROM THE PUB

On a related note: you should absolutely never steal toilet paper or condiments like ketchup from your local Spoons or Greene King pub. And don’t even think about decking out your kitchen with an array of pilfered pint glasses. (SS)